No Tea

out any self- consciousness, even enjoying the retelling of his interlocutor’s
story as the audience listens intently:
After Raheim takes off all of his clothes, places them into a paper bag
(with his handle written on it), and gives it to a guy working the party,
he enters the dark back room. As soon as he enters he smells a mixture
of sweat and cologne. He sees a king size bed with dudes getting
fucked all over it, some doggy style, up against the wall, and others on
their backs on the bed, in every corner of the room. Every body’s fucking
raw, and he neither sees nor feels condom packages on the floor. A
dude comes up to Raheim, bends down [in] front of him and puts his
dick in his mouth and starts to suck it until it gets hard. Then he turns
around and claims a corner of the bed. He bends over and toots his ass up,
signaling to Raheim to enter him raw. Soon after Raheim starts to fuck
him, the guy’s ass is so tight and hot that after a few pumps, Raheim
feels like he is about to bust, “You gon let me cum in this booty . . .
huh[?] . . . You gon let me cum in this booty?” The guy moans and starts
breathing really hard, as his thighs begin to shake intensely, “Yea bust
that nut nigga; give me them kids.” 16
I must say that as an old- school mother, 17 I did clutch my pearls a time
or two during Bailey’s pre sen ta tion at the explicit nature of Raheim’s
adventures. The rest of the audience, who were mostly of a younger generation,
however, engaged in an almost call- and- response to Bailey, as
they snapped their fin gers and responded verbally to his erotic per formance.
Harkening back to Fisher and Reid- Pharr, one might assume that
this repre sen ta tion of black queer sex within an academic setting would
be shocking, not so much because of the language used to describe the
sex acts (although the language is explic itly provocative), but more so
because of the kind of sex being narrated: unprotected same- gender sex.
Given the scourge of hiv/aids on the black community, the notion of
black people seeking out opportunities to engage in high- risk sex is indeed
a hard nut to swallow (pun intended). But the point of Bailey’s paper
and the essay included in this volume is that desire is dangerous, and
despite evidence to the contrary, some marginalized groups like black gay
men are willing to take risks that might endanger their lives just so that
they can experience intimacy— through touch, sweat, heat—in ways that
they never experience living in white supremacist society that constantly
rejects them. Indeed, Bailey’s research casts a light on raw sex as a practice
Introduction • 9